How CTOs Can Justify Technology Investments to the Board

Modern CTOs and engineering leaders are no longer just technology operators. They are increasingly strategic business leaders guiding the technology investment and strategies that impact business outcomes. That means building teams that can deliver, funding projects that move the needle, and developing strategies that tie technology to measurable business outcomes in the short and long term. Whether that’s increasing revenue, reducing costs, speeding innovation, or limiting risk, every strong technology executive needs to think of their job in the context of outcome impact.

But while technology leaders need a business mindset, they can’t count on every board or C-level audience being equally fluent in technology. They must abstract the technical details of a given initiative or effort while still conveying the measurable impact on one of those outcomes. The most effective way to do this is by anchoring proposals in a limited set of metrics that are straightforward and clearly explained, easy to measure and baseline against, and trackable over time.

Below are some examples of tying initiatives, metrics, and investments to a particular outcome.

Reducing Costs

Building and running digital products and services costs money. This won’t come as a shock to board members or senior executives. However, technology and engineering leaders who recognize the season or phase of growth the organization is in can adapt accordingly, emphasizing greater efficiency around expenditures and focusing on reducing wasted cycles in engineering without compromising delivery.

Understanding board prioritization can put technology leaders in a position to frame initiatives and investments in the context of efficiency and savings. Positioning migration to cloud-native environments as reducing infrastructure costs by embracing elasticity and automation is a perfect example. By building containerized workloads, engineering teams can minimize engineering toil and lost labor while simultaneously cutting costs associated with lengthy deployments and costly rollbacks.

Well-understood and benchmarked DevOps metrics can help tell the story of efficiency and savings to leaders, while also providing internal transparency into critical outcomes.

Relevant metrics include:

• Shortening Change Lead Time: How quickly a code change gets from commit to production. Shorter lead times reduce the cost of delays and inefficiency.

• Lowering Failed Deployment Recovery Time: The average time it takes to recover from a failed release. Faster recovery means shorter costly disruptions.

• Increasing Infrastructure Efficiency: How effectively resources are utilized, particularly as organizations shift workloads to cloud environments.

Increasing Revenue

For organizations that are expanding their geographic footprint and/or moving into new industries and sectors, technology leaders can focus investments on lowering the barrier and costs of entry, as well as shoring up new and recurring revenue streams by removing procurement hurdles.

Technology leaders can position investments like embedding secure-by-design processes into the software build and delivery pipelines as critical to shortening compliance audits, accelerating procurement cycles, and expanding into regulated industries like financial services or public sectors.

These kinds of initiatives in a finely tuned compliance- and security-centric software development approach can lead directly to driving more revenue out of existing offerings, serving as a key method for increasing the monetization of previous innovations.

Technology leaders can help tell that story with the following metrics:

• Increasing New Market ARR: Annual recurring revenue from new sectors, geographies, or customer segments.

• Lowering Percentage of Deals Lost or Delayed Due to Compliance Blockers: The most direct measure of missed revenue tied to technical readiness.

• Time to Audit Completion: How long it takes to pass a compliance audit or security review, which directly affects time-to-market.

Speeding Innovation

For organizations operating in high growth environments, building new products and features quickly is often the path to category dominance, especially in frothy and highly innovative spaces.

Technology leaders need to showcase how dollars spent on everything from tooling to talent will make the innovation machine go faster.

Justification for initiatives hinges on the ability of board members to connect efforts of standardization and developer experience to output, especially around initiatives like building a high velocity engineering organization. Conveying how an investment in the right tooling can free developers to build without sacrificing security and quality is critical to illustrating the connection between tooling investments and engineering velocity.

Focusing on core velocity metrics helps shine a light on how new investments are equating to lower friction and more features being delivered. Look to the following metrics to help:

• Increasing Deployment Frequency: How often code is shipped to production. High frequency reflects fast iteration and responsiveness.

• Lowering Time to First Commit: How quickly a new developer can onboard and contribute. Lower times accelerate the overall innovation cycle.

• Increasing Artifact Reuse Rate: How much teams reuse secure, validated components across products, which reduces duplicated effort.

• Increasing Developer Morale and Flow: Harder to quantify, but critical to sustaining innovation velocity.

Reducing Risk

No matter the organization’s size, technology leaders will always want to be mindful of the role of risk within their leadership’s priorities. The larger the organization, the more the board and the business as a whole have to lose, creating a bigger sense of urgency around risk.

Technology leaders have a critical role to play in the actual steps taken to reduce risk across critical areas of the technology stack, whether it’s the software supply chain, production environments, or build pipelines.

Leveraging the ubiquity of supply chain attacks as a driving force to build a secure-by-default SDLC or to rethink the organization’s approach to cyber resilience can serve as a strong motivator to company leadership, especially with the right metrics to promote joint progress with security counterparts. Boards understand risk in financial terms, so tying these initiatives to measurable reductions in detection time, remediation speed, and exposure windows enables technology leaders to position investments as essential to protecting shareholder value.

Relevant metrics include:

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): The average time it takes to identify a security incident. Shorter times reduce exposure.

• Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR): How quickly issues are resolved. Faster remediation reduces impact and cost.

Across cost reduction, revenue expansion, innovation speed, and risk mitigation, one consistent area of opportunity and potential weakness is the supply chain for modern development: open source. Open source is the foundation of nearly every modern digital product, but unmanaged, it introduces drift, bottlenecks, vulnerabilities, and audit headaches.

Customers we work with often discuss some executive priority that drove action: eliminating CVE risks, speeding up engineering cycles, or receiving their FedRAMP authorization and opening up federal sales. While each priority wasn’t explicitly about open source software, each was reliant upon solving an open source software challenge.

By building on a secure-by-default OSS foundation, CTOs can make a compelling case to boards: these aren’t just technical projects—they’re investments that measurably advance the company’s strategic outcomes.

Chainguard Containers is the secure-by-default OSS foundation for many of the world’s leading organizations. Check out the Chainguard Value Calculator and see how we can help your organization in each of the areas listed in this blog.